Arnold Dolmetsch's The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries appeared quietly in 1915. In one bold stroke its author staked out a preeminent position as the first to grapple comprehensively in any language with the problems of historical performances of repertoires before Haydn and Mozart. That his study remains well-thumbed today-it was reprinted as recently as 1969-is testimonial both to its profuse documentation and to its practical bent. For Dolmetsch "old music" meant the various instrumental styles of the Baroque, and consequently more than half of his treatise is devoted to ornamentation alone. His views were unfailingly independent and not infrequently eccentric-as in this aside, one of the few concerning music with which we are more directly concerned: "How the tenor violin came to be discarded is incomprehensible. Any orchestral score, be it Haydn's or Wagner's, shows the crying need of it."' But apart from offhand remarks of this sort, it seems apparent that Dolmetsch felt no pressing need to turn a similar searchlight on music between Bach and his own time.